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Video Library

Since 2002 Perimeter Institute has been recording seminars, conference talks, and public outreach events using video cameras installed in our lecture theatres. Perimeter now has 7 formal presentation spaces for its many scientific conferences, seminars, workshops and educational outreach activities, all with advanced audio-visual technical capabilities. Recordings of events in these areas are all available On-Demand from this Video Library and on Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive (PIRSA). PIRSA is a permanent, free, searchable, and citable archive of recorded seminars from relevant bodies in physics. This resource has been partially modelled after Cornell University's arXiv.org.

An object which has been under attack from several fronts is the planar S-matrix of N=4 SYM. One approach towards addressing the computation of scattering amplitudes using integrability is by using an analogues of an Operator Product Expansion for these observables. It is a very general expansion that is based on the dual conformal symmetry of the amplitudes or their dual description in terms of null polygon Wilson loops. In this expansion the Wilson loop/amplitude is viewed as a transition amplitude for flux tube excitations.

I review how N=4 SYM can be reformulated as a theory on twistor space, and explain various calculations that have been performed there. In particular, twistors turn out to be a powerful tool for investigating the duality between scattering amplitudes and null polygonal Wilson Loops in the planar limit. The BCFW recursion relations are interpreted as the loop equations for a supersymmetric generalization of the Wilson Loop.

The S-matrix of N=4 super Yang-Mills in the planar limit enjoys a remarkable duality with non-BPS null polygon Wilson loops in the same theory, but with the role of momenta and position interchanged. I will attempt to explain how such a duality works, by stressing how familiar notions such as factorization limits, unitarity and the loop integrand translate into simple and verifiable statements about Wilson loops. This requires a suitable supersymmetric extension of Wilson loops, which I will describe.

We study the four-point correlation function of stress-tensor supermultiplets in N=4 SYM using the method of Lagrangian insertions. We argue that, as a corollary of N=4 superconformal symmetry, the resulting all-loop integrand possesses an unexpected complete symmetry under the exchange of the four external and all the internal (integration) points. This alone allows us to predict the integrand of the three-loop correlation function up to four undetermined constants.